When Leslie Kee attended the opening of his first gallery exhibition in November 2011, it was the culmination of years of work as a foreign photographer working in Japan. The series, titled Forever Young, featured glossy shots of full male nudes, stylized to match his commercial fashion work, but unretouched and presented as art.

Last week though, he earned a combination of notoriety and heroism when he was arrested and thrown in jail on charges of obscenity for the second exhibition of the series, again at the Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, which featured similar full-frontal shots of men with erections. BLOUIN ARTINFO Japan sat down with him to discuss his story, and the boundaries of art and pornography.